Cloanto Releases PowerPC Blitting Library for Personal Paint
7

The "personal_ppc_blit.library" for Personal Paint 7
and other Cloanto programs has just been released on Aminet (biz/cloan/PBlit_PPC.lha).
Like previous 68K CPU blitting libraries, this library allows
Personal Paint to work on bitmaps in Fast RAM instead of Chip RAM
in supporting RTG environments. The PowerPC version adds to this
advantage a considerable performance boost.

Benchmarked on a PowerPC 603e running at 150 MHz, this
software-only blitter performed twice as fast as an AGA hardware
blitter (please note: this is a comparison between hardware
emulated in software and dedicated hardware, not software and
software). The tests were conducted on a PowerUP board by Phase
5, running a mixed combination of average blitter operations (not
just simple copies, but complex blitter logic). These results are
particularly impressive in consideration of the performance
overhead associated to 68K-PowerPC interprocess communication, task switching
and memory sharing, which among other things involve frequent CPU cache
flushing. As more parts of the Amiga operating system are ported to native PowerPC code, and with the fast evolution
of Amiga PowerPC compilers, these results can only get more and
more exciting.

We proudly believe to be the first company shipping PowerPC
code to Amiga users. In spite of the very difficult times for
Amiga software developers, at Cloanto we continue to invest more
than ever in the Amiga, and we are working on new versions of
popular titles like Personal Paint. We would like to thank the
entire Amiga community for its continued support and trust in our
software.